"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)

Monday, August 31, 2015

"Finally with his family after 5 years of unjust imprisonment Yosvani Melchor on probation. Enough blackmail end the impunity." - Rosa María Payá

Yosvani
Melchor Rodriguez, unjustly detained

Five years, five months and 12 days after he was arbitrarily detained Yosvani
Melchor Rodriguez was freed on probation on August 30, 2015. He should not have spent one day in jail and has suffered in order to make his mother suffer for not agreeing to become an informant for the Castro regime's state security services against the Christian Liberation Movement. Last month on June 24, 2015 Rosa María Rodríguez Gil addressed
the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva and called for the release of her
son, Yosvani
Melchor Rodriguez, unjustly imprisoned since March 19, 2010. In her statement she outlined the circumstances that led to his arbitrary detention:

My name is Rosa Maria Rodriguez Gil, I am a member of the Coordinating
Council of the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) and I live in Havana,
Cuba.For
my activism and commitment to the MCL ... because I refused to collaborate with the Cuban political police, my son Yosvani
Melchor Rodriguez, a young man with psychological problems, was
arbitrarily arrested, subjected to a show trial, where the
prosecution was unable to demonstrate evidence of an alleged crime of trafficking in
persons that he did not commit, they sanctioned him to 12 years in prison and he has spent 5 years in the prisons of Cuba. My son is being punished as a vendetta for my participation in the civic and
constitutional campaign for a referendum where the people can freely decide
whether if they want democracy. Not content to kidnap my son, the Cuban authorities denied Yosvani
even the right to parole, that all inmate has on the island once they
have passed the half way point of the sanction imposed, in this case
unjustly.

"There are political prisoners in Cuba; the son of a member of the
Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) was sentenced to 12 years in jail
for the sole reason of being the son of a MCL member. His name is
Yosvany Melchor Rodriguez and he was artificially condemned in Santiago
de Cuba on November 30, 2010, after his mother was threatened by state
security forces for not wanting to cooperate against us."

It is important to celebrate Yosvani's freedom and continue to demand that his freedom not be conditional. Furthermore, it is important to remember the circumstances under which this young man was denied his liberty in order to terrorize his mother into spying on a nonviolent dissident organization.

Human rights defender and lawyer Razan Zaitouneh,
head of the Violations Documentation Centre in Syria (VDC), winner of
the 2011 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and the 2011 Anna
Politkovskaya Award of RAW in WAR (Reach All Women In War), along with her colleagues Samira Khalil, Nazem Hamadi and Wa’el Hamada on December 9, 2013, were taken during a raid by armed men on the offices of the VDC in Duma, near Damascus. They remain missing.

Is this not newsworthy? Or the fact that on August 24, 2015 state security (G2) detained Oscar Elías Biscet and released him 20 km from his home in order to prevent him giving the presentation: Why is it that U.S. - Cuba relations violate the Libertad Act?

Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet

Even among those The New York Times reporter chooses to quote he fails to provide context. For example, he quotes Yoani Sanchez and 14 y Medio but fails to mention how she took him to task on December 6, 2014 for his editorials in The New York Times describing them as "really pitiful." Miriam Celaya, raised a question in the same article that many Cubans who read his editorials asked themselves:

What is going on with these editorials? They are still giving prominence
to a distorted, biased view, composed of half-truths and lies about
what the Cuban reality is. They are still giving prominence to what a
government says, and Cuba is not a government. Cuba's government today
is a small group of old men, and when I say "old" it's because of their
way of thinking, of individuals who have remained anchored in discourse
rooted in a cold war and belligerence. The Cuban people are not
represented in that government.

Both Yoani Sanchez and Miriam Celaya are Cuban dissidents who are advocates of lifting sanctions but even they have publicly questioned the work of Mr. Londoño because it does not reflect the reality in Cuba.

Article I.
In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the
Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall
represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and U.S.S.R. In this
connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party.

Article II.
In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to
the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded
approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San.
The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an
independent Polish States and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely
determined in the course of further political developments.
In any event both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement.

Article III.
With regard to Southeastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its
interest in Bessarabia. The German side declares its complete political disinterestedness in these
areas.

It is important to recall that between 1933 and 1939 American tourists who went to see the
"real" Nazi Germany came back with stories of how wonderful the Third Reich was and the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin further legitimized the
regime. The famous American aviator, Charles Lindbergh, visited Germany five times between 1936 and 1939.
Lindbergh was taken on tours of airfields and factories, lavishly
entertained by Air Marshal Hermann Göring, and awarded one of the Third
Reich’s highest civilian honors. Lindbergh wrote to the banker
Harry Davison, “With all the things we criticize, he [Hitler] is
undoubtedly a great man, and I believe has done much for the German
people."

Seventy six years later one finds that totalitarian propaganda is still effective in misrepresenting itself and the threat to others. The fact that Sputnik News is still peddling the Soviet propaganda cover story used back in the late 1930s is evidence of this and a reminder of the wisdom of George Santayana who observed:

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When
change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction
is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as
among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it."

Taking the above into consideration leads to an unpleasant conclusion. Secretary John Kerry asking the Castro regime in Cuba to help in Venezuela today is like asking Jack the Ripper to help stop knife violence in London in 1888.

Monday, August 17, 2015

On December 16, 2014, the eve of the announcement of a new relationship between the United States and the Castro regime, Cuban Patrol Boat sank a boatload of 32 Cuban refugees and one of them Diosbel Díaz Biotowent missing and is assumed drowned the others were detained.

Diosbel Díaz Bioto: Died December 16, 2014

Four months later Yuriniesky Martínez Reina was shot in the back and killed by state security chief Miguel Angel Río Seco Rodríguezin the Martí municipality of Matanzas, Cuba on April 9, 2015 for peacefully trying to leave Cuba.
A group of young men were building a boat near Menéndez beach to
flee the island, when they were spotted trying to leave and were shot at by state security. If they had made it to dry land they would be free, but if caught at sea the U.S. coastguard then would have returned them to the Castro dictatorship. This is a violation of the spirit of the Cuban Adjustment Act, a 1966 law that granted refugee status to those fleeing Cuba from 1966 until 1994.

Yuriniesky Martínez Reina killed April 9, 2015

At the same time many Cuban athletes continue to defect to the United States. This is something Mexican, Jamaican, or Dominican athletes do not have to do because they are free to enter and exit their own countries. Additionally their governments do not limit their right to live and work abroad. In the case of Mexico some Americans are upset because the Mexican government provides aid and assistance to Mexican migrants in the United States. Cuba is the only country in this hemisphere, although Venezuela is trending in the same direction, in which the regime does not recognize the rights of Cuban nationals to enter and exit their own country. Cuba is different from the rest of the countries in the hemisphere.

Meanwhile there is also an additional security concern. Author and journalist Fabiola Santiago brought up the concerns
of exiled opposition activist Yoan David Gonzalez in her August 12, 2015
column "Pro-Castro there, but now here?" on Cuban repressor Jenny
Freire Rosabal who engaged in acts of repudiation in Cuba and rallied for Chavez in Venezuela who is now living here in Miami with her husband
who is slandering democratic opposition activists from the island.Unfortunately,
these are not new problems but the result of the Clinton
administration's immigration accord with the Castro regime in 1995 that
violated the spirit of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act deporting Cuban refugees back to the Castro regime. Carl McGill, Professor of Criminal
Justice at University of Phoenix in 2000 compared "Clinton's
policy to return 'rafters' to Cuba" was "like returning a slave in
pre-Civil War America back to his enslaver. This would have condoned
civil rights violations and slavery, as returning a 'rafter' to Cuba
condones human rights violations and communism." The Dred Scott Decision is a historical abomination as is President Clinton's wet foot, dry foot policy that circumvented the intent of the Cuban Adjustment Act.

The General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that "for over 30 years, fleeing Cubans had been welcomed to the United
States; however, the U.S. government reversed this policy on August 19,
1994, when President Clinton announced that Cuban rafters interdicted at
sea would no longer be brought to the United States." Wet foot, dry foot" was a massive set back for Cuban refugees.

At
the same time the 1995 agreement called on the Castro regime to register Cubans for a lottery and up to 20,000 "immigrants" would be eligible to
enter the United States annually. This is what has led to the South
Florida being filled with regime repressors and who knows how many spies. Rosabel is not the first to
be called out. In
November 2012 The Miami Herald reported on former Cuban provincial
prisons chief Crescencio Marino Rivero who abused prisoners and ordered
guards to abuse others before he moved to Miami.

Cresencio Marino Rivero, Cuban prison chief found in Miami

This is in spite of the August 4, 2011 Obama Administration ban on visas
for people who the State Department finds have been involved in human
rights violations. Cuban human rights violators continue to get a free
pass to enter the United States and when identified by their victims, nothing happens.

Despite the plane load of lobbyists and businessmen and the Cuban spies CNN anchor Jake Tapper in a tweet observed that there was plenty of space to have invited Cuban dissidents. This indicates that it was not space considerations but bending over backwards to accommodate the Castro dictatorship that led to the decision not to invite human rights defenders. This combined with the shabby treatment of Rosa María Payá last month by State Department spokesman John Kirby and the message is clear and journalist Andres Oppenheimer laid it out:

Kerry’s trip to Havana didn’t break new ground on human rights even symbolically, and in effect hurt Cuba’s fledgling internal opposition by making it look irrelevant in the eyes of many Cubans. Could it be that Obama is so eager to visit Cuba before he finishes his term — to go down in history as the U.S. president who “opened” Cuba, much as Nixon “opened” China — that he is willing to sacrifice the human rights cause? Could it be that he is so eager for a foreign policy victory that he is willing to abandon a long-standing U.S. policy of moral support to pro-democracy activists?

If you doubt this then just asked yourself then why there was room to fly down a plane load of business men and lobbyists for doing business with the dictatorship but no room for human rights defenders at the flag raising ceremony? The answer is brutally simple. Business and engagement with the dictatorship in Cuba is the priority not human rights or the freedom of the Cuban people.

The lesson is clear when dealing with the Obama administration: Pay attention to what they do and not what they say.

Friday, August 14, 2015

“Our Movement denounces the regime's attempt to impose a fraudulent change, i.e. change without rights and the inclusion of many interests in this change that sidesteps democracy and the sovereignty of the people of Cuba.” - Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, March 30, 2012

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Despite what the Obama Administration and mainstream media would have you believe the United States and the Castro regime have had extensive diplomatic contacts since 1977, military contacts since 1994, and trade since 2000. This is why when Obama pledged on December 17, 2014 the objective of normalizing diplomatic relations
the Castro regime was able to raise numerous demands that the United
States has complied with that undermine U.S. security and credibility.
Below are five reasons why the normalization of relations with the Castro regime is unfolding into another Obama foreign policy failure:

Secretary of State John Kerry will be in Havana,
Cuba to raise the flag at the US Embassy on Friday, August 14, 2015 and
that would be the perfect day to remind the world the price paid in
compromising not only the national security of the United States (freeing
terrorist spies
and letting ones guard down as to the terrorist threat posed by the
dictatorship) but also undermining the credibility of the State
Department's report on human trafficking and respect for human rights.
Above are images that you can click on and share
with others on social media or print them out to use in public protests
to hold the administration accountable for another foreign policy failure while recognizing that there is a nonviolent alternative.

"So far as I can see the atomic bomb has
deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages. There
used to be the so-called laws of
war which made it tolerable. Now we know the naked truth. War knows no
law except that of might. The atom bomb brought an empty victory to the
allied arms but
it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has
happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see.
Forces of nature act in a mysterious manner. We can but solve the
mystery by deducing the unknown result from the known results of similar
events. A slave-holder cannot hold a
slave without putting himself or his deputy in the cage holding the
slave. Let no one run away with the idea that I wish to put in a defence
of Japanese misdeeds in pursuance of Japan's unworthy ambition. The
difference was only of one degree. I assume that Japan's greed was more
unworthy. But the greater unworthiness conferred no right on the
less unworthy of destroying without mercy men, women and children of
Japan in a particular area."

Below is the keynote address by Reverend Jim Lawson at the Campaign Nonviolence National Convention at Los Alamos on August 7, 2015:

"This doctrine of progress is a most interesting instance of the blind and foolish confidence of Americans in the God Progress. None of them—not Joseph Smith, not William James, not John Dewey—know what this progress is toward, not even what direction it is to take. Thus far, apparently, it has been progress toward annihilation, an end to be accomplished, perhaps, by the improved atomic bomb? We have dealt more death and destruction in the space of ten years than the men of the Middle Ages, with their Devil, were able to accomplish in a thousand."

We must never forget what nuclear weapons
wrought upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet we must also remain mindful
that our maintenance of a strong nuclear deterrent has for four decades
ensured the security of the United States and the freedom of our allies
in Asia and Europe. In Europe, these years represent the longest period
of peace since the early 19th century. Peace has not made us complacent,
for we are continually seeking ways to reduce still further the risks
of war. As I have often stated, "A nuclear war cannot be won and must
never be fought." This anniversary is, therefore, a time not only for
reflection but for action.

[...]

I would also urge the leadership of the
Soviet Union to work with us to achieve deep, verifiable, and equitable
reductions in nuclear arsenals; to resolve questions relating to
compliance with existing arms control agreements; and to establish a
constructive dialog on ways to reduce the risk of accidental war.

“Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole
cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and
man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.”

Beginning today nonviolent activists will gather at Los Alamos to observe this anniversary of a war crime over live stream at the exact spot where the bomb that fell on Hiroshima was built. American patriots need to recognize this in order to save the United States and the West generally. Conservatives are justifiably horrified by the radical changes in American society over the past half century. Arch Bishop Fulton J. Sheen in the essay“What Now America?” reflected on the impact of the atomic bombs:

“When, I wonder, did we in America ever get into this idea that freedom
means having no boundaries and no limits? I think it began on the 6th of
August 1945 at 8:15 am when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. … Somehow
or other, from that day on in our American life, we say we want no
limits and no boundaries.”

Time for conservatives to reflect further on the two atomic bombs dropped over two civilian centers and the principle that the ends do not justify the means. The world has never been the same since those horrible days in August of 1945.

Please spread the word on this courageous artist and activist. It is the best way to keep him safe and to obtain his freedom.Update: The good news is that Gorki was freed around 4:00pm and that international press picked up the story of his detention the same day. The bad news is that he has been threatened by Cuban officials that if he continues to support the Ladies in White on Sundays and attend opposition meetings at Gandhi Park he will no longer be allowed to travel outside of Cuba. This is how State Security said it to the punk rocker: "he who invites you to visit another country will have to come to look for you in a motorboat" to smuggle him out of the country. Gorki's response to the events of today and threat issued:

"They violate all your rights one after another: the right to march peacefully, to freedom of expression, right to travel, arbitrary arrest. It is incredible all that they do in just one arrest."